Alecto's Ophelia

Solstice.

 

I just finished a twelve hour tour of duty in my kitchen which came on top of eight hours yesterday. This is Solstice weekend which means every cookie, tomato sauce, jelly, curd, chocolate and loaf of bread, cooked, baked, canned and packaged for the Solstice occurred in the last 36 hours. I did sleep, I watched a movie too. It was I am Legend and it was good (and I LOVE Omega Man, so there).

In the mean time a Christmas tree was acquired and lights and pretty things were hung and the stockings were located and the menorah and the candles and the latkes, sour cream and apple sauce from the last of the wrapped September apples. The Solstice and Hanukkah coincide this year, which is very, very cool.

Last year we lost Sparky on or about the Solstice and it about blew me apart tonight. I wonder how the hell his family keeps breathing sometimes because half the time I feel like I got the wind knocked right out of me and I really just want to know how long it takes to get over someone?

I make things at Solstice. You can call it whatever holiday you want, it's Solstice timewise. I don't like to buy things unless it's something I know you need and can't buy yourself otherwise I'm going to make something and if you receive something I made it's because I give a rat's ass about you.

That's lost on most people these days. A cookie's a cookie, right?

About ten years ago I made my first batch of 1,000 cookies (or whatever), packaged them up and delivered them in person. They were received or not received as a matter of course until I got to Sparky and you know, Sparky got that half assed batch you give somebody you sort of give a shit about but maybe don't know so well. So anyway, Sparky comes all the way over from building one to building two and tells me this story about making stuff for people and how much it matters and all that and how this stupid box of cookies just about blew him away.

And that story he told just about blew me away. Most of the time, really, seriously MOST of the time, we have no real idea that we matter. Not a freaking clue.

I haven't missed a Solstice since.

I love you, Sparky and it hurts a lot still. I guess the way it's meant to hurt.

On the Art of being Inappropriate

Posting has become very difficult. Commenting has become very difficult but nobody should take that personally; I’m certainly still reading and I have a lot to say but if your comments require authentication I can no longer post a comment during the day and at night, well at night I just haven’t been able to. I’d offer up excuses that anybody would buy in a heartbeat but what the hell would be the point in that? This is a life blog where we strive for honest, forthright communication. Well, I do anyway. It’s my purpose for being here. Here is where I write the things I might not say otherwise. Here is where I document the things that matter in my life in a way that I cannot easily communicate elsewhere.

And it was all good until my family members started reading my blog and I had to start filtering. And then I started having real feelings for the sensibilities of my readers and I had to start filtering there. And then life got hard again and I stopped writing all together because I didn’t feel I could write most of my truths without pissing off or offending somebody and no matter what anybody tells me about people pleasing paranoia and all that, this is real for me. Conflict, real or perceived, makes me curl up under the proverbial bed with my thumb in my mouth and my eyes squeezed shut. That right there might be too much information for some of you.

Anyway, I don’t want my family members to stop reading my blog. It’s pretty much the only way you know I’m still breathing. I do want you to take what I write with a grain of salt and recognize that it’s about me, not you. I don’t want my blog friends to stop reading and if I offend any of you with too much information or a conflicting opinion, belief or behavior I’m sorry for that but I value your presence and your input. Actually, I love that you’re out there. Somehow it all makes me feel a bit more human and connected. So I’m going to try this again, one more time, because most of the time it keeps me grounded.

So that’s it. That’s all I really wanted to say right now except I’ve been looking down a pretty deep black hole lately and I’m doing my best not to tip in and the beloved kitty who has been with me through three marriages and two divorces went over the rainbow bridge on Saturday but the three remaining chickens are good and Simon is cool as hell even though I’m pretty sure he just passed the 50 pound mark (he’s fifteen weeks old today) and I quit my night and weekend job (the one at home that makes me happiest but won’t pay the mortgage) at least until my family pulls their collective heads out of their collective asses and starts pitching in unconditionally and I’ll write about all of it in the very near future. I’m pretty sure it’s a good story.

 

 

When we all still lived in the castle

OK, I’ve been a total slacker and the Typepad editor is still unusable by me. We’ll see if I can stand the formatting issues that come with a copy paste from Word.

Anyway, Total Slacker has been hanging out over on Facebook like a total addict. It’s OK, I have plenty of company. I’ve been hanging with Cielo and her husband too! There are a few more of you out there but for the sake of anyone wishing to remain anonymous I’ll leave that alone.

I’ve had a Facebook account for about fifteen months. I set it up at the request of friend from middle school who is currently expatriated just outside of London and it seemed like a good way to keep in touch. I didn’t have a lot of hope for it though and even mentioned in my profile that I was more likely than not to forget my user id and password and then that would be the end of me. Or at least the end of my Facebook presence.

Little by little I accumulated ‘friends’. Not too many and I didn’t do a blasted thing with them either. I kind of got it about this ‘wall’ thing and I had myself a vampire and a werewolf and knew how to send a virtual gift. Most of my friends were self selecting, they found me. If I knew them I said ‘yes’. If I didn’t know them I deleted the friend request (I did get some weird ones in the beginning).

Last April when we were in the Au Pair selection process I had this year’s Au Pair set up an account so that she could get to my account and look at pictures because I had been unsuccessful sending her anything. That was as useful as it ever got with the exception of being able to post family photo albums that nobody got to see any other way.

This October, just six months later, the nanny is jettisoned from the house (she was given 48 hours to retrieve her belongings properly chaperoned) and I needed to remove her from my Facebook profile. I needed to remove her, my daughter needed to remove her and last years needed the boot as well. In this process of discovery I clicked something called Friend Finder and boy did I go to town. So, less one nanny and plus forty old friends. Yeah, you read that right. 40. And I don’t like people, remember?

Not all of them are intimate friendships. Some have become passing acquaintances. All of it is worth networking value and the entertainment factor has been very high of late. I have reconnected with people I barely remember from high school, people I can’t believe I forgot from high school and people I can’t believe I ever walked away from at the high tech company.

I found my old best friend. The one I had when we all still lived in the castle and Jeffrey wasn’t anywhere near dead and four of us ran in a pack (we’re still missing one and Jeffrey, well, he’s kind of dead) and the world was young and good and we were all gods of the burgeoning virtual world. And nothing really awful had happened to any of us yet. As adults that is.

And then all hell broke lose and the four of us split right down the middle and I didn’t see her again, well, until yesterday.

And all I want to do is find a way to tell Jeffrey it’s all right now. I found a way to stop being alone. I found a way to get back home.

The abundance of being alive

I didn't expect much of this garden after the first set of tomatoes more or less bit the dust and most of the carrots and onions didn't bother to do much of anything and the cucumbers turned out round and orange and the squash rotted on the vine and Audrey the pumpkin got out of hand and I did my best just to breathe because that's what brought me here in the first place.

The need to breathe.

I am alone today and tomorrow and two more sleeps after that (not in the car, CG, but I do think of it that way because it is hard to imagine any world that does not have he and me in it together) and I am the epitome of uncomfortable. I have not been alone other than for just one night since I came out of the hospital on Valentine's Day blinking into the sunlight and wondering how it got to be so hard to walk outside in the world. A few of you will know what I mean when I say that the world inverted in on itself and I walked around like some crunched up easter egg rolling off the edge of the universe. I miss MC most times like these because she knew too and it's hard to explain if you haven't had the top of your head come off because words don't come anywhere near doing it justice. It's just a state of being too far off the map for speech. Which might be part of the problem, this need to explain something that probably cannot be said in words. Just breath, maybe. And I'll tell you, neither therapist I've been intimate with for six months could even begin to navigate this paragraph. I just go and write the checks and come home because I am still a good girl in my little compartmentalized ways.

And if it is a good day it's all good and I do what I do and I am satisfied that I have a place in the world. And if it is a bad day I come home and crawl into Beloved's arms and find some amount of peace there. And if it is a very, very bad day and I scream and rail at the world he finds a way, most times, to bring me home again.

He's not here.

I am OK but OK and uncomfortable are coexisting which is a step or two in the right direction. I was never afraid like this. OK, once, when I was pregnant with my boy and I thought about how I would feel if my husband died and I thought, well I have this boy inside me (I knew) and as long as I can get him born all right I will have a piece of something to get me by. I have always struggled with being alone in the world and hold on with all my might when I find a place to put my heart.

And now, really for the first time, I hold on with all my might when I decide to be safe outside my own four walls. I cried last night and fretted up one side and down the other for weeks and finally worked out that none of this was about being alone for four days. It is about being alone forever.

Eighteen months ago we all went to this conference. Eighteen months ago I held Jeffrey's hand and we found an old friend and he confessed to a ten year crush and she blushed and he did and it balanced something and we moved on. We went to dinner, Nomans and Jeffrey and me and another friend who matters like air and is hardly seen at all these days and ate Tapas and drank Sangria except Jeffrey who was still trying to say alive. And we were together and we were happy.

And Jeffrey is dead and NoMans is in San Francisco and I couldn't bear to go without Jeffrey this year even if we hadn't suspended all travel and I didn't want to leave the girls alone for that long with just the nanny. And I know that not all rats bite but I am so very, very afraid that he will not come back the same way that Jeffrey just did not come back and I have no idea how I would even begin to bear that.

Sometimes there are land mines and sometimes there are craters and I'm sitting in one now but I think I can see the end of the other side and I can get there on my own. And that's a good thing.

The Lumberjack Song

OK, here's the story. Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2005 Jeffrey and I worked together with RW at my (I write 'my' because I don't believe RW is quite through with the startup world, masochist that he is) last startup. We worked very closely with a help desk and a bunch of developers based out of Tel Aviv. In this video we are singing the Lumberjack song for our friend Yoni, to make him smile. Our friend Eyal was stateside with us and it's his webcam on his monitor we're singing into.

And before anyone gets all excited, I already know I won't be having a singing career and probably should never inflict myself on anyone outside the shower ever again. I did this for love and it took a lot to record it and a lot more to post it. Jeffrey had a fabulous second career as an amateur actor and did quite a bit of singing. I had the opportunity to see him play Noah in local production of a musical called Two by Two which just wreaked havoc with everything I thought I already knew about the guy.

He looks great here, by the way. He was sick then but it gradually got so much worse I'd almost forgotten this when. This when is a beautiful time and space.

To dream, per chance, to live

I dreamed Jeffrey last night. Not, I dreamed about Jeffrey, I dreamed. He came to dinner. He looked a lot better then he'd looked in maybe ten years, maybe better then I'd ever known him to look. He looked healthy, and smaller somehow. He was sitting across the table from NoMans and me. Not my house, not my table but mine all the same. Everything seemed bigger, more spacious. Except Jeffrey. He looked compact and well, good.

So there's this big plate of mashed potatoes in the middle of the table and my skinny husband is eating them right off the serving plate (since when do we serve mashed potatoes from a plate?) like there's no tomorrow but Jeffrey doesn't have a fork and he won't use NoMan's although somehow I think NoMans was willing to share his fork. I pull spoon after spoon out of the drawer and they're all dirty, it's just bizarre. Finally I find a fork that doesn't look like it's been sucked on and thrown back in the mix and I hand it across the table to Jeffrey. But NoMans has eaten that entire plate of mashed potatoes. Jeffrey looks a little disappointed but that's it. As if this is just the way it is.

During the meal he's explaining to us that it is, as we have known for some time, very bad indeed. That there is not much time left. I look at him across the table and I tell him I know. I know. And then I go back to looking for spoons.

That's it, I woke up, but I think it was enough.

So this morning as I'm rushing about with NoMans getting Little Girl's hair into sixteen pony tails because it's funky hair day and onto the bus on time and I'm thinking about dinner and I have NoMans pull out a quartered chicken because I want fried chicken for dinner.

Back the truck up. I do not eat fried chicken. I do not eat fried much of anything. The last time I fried chicken was right after Cletus was born so that's about sixteen years ago. I don't even know how I know how to fry chicken but I do. It's real easy. You mix some egg and milk and dip in the parts and then you roll the eggy milk parts in flour with salt and pepper and you fry it in really hot oil. You put the dark meat in first. Then you take the chicken out and drain it on some towels. You dispose of or recycle all but two tablespoons of oil and the pan drippings and you make gravy with a bit more flour, some chicken stock and some milk if you're feeling that way. I dumped some wine in there too because I'm like that. More salt and pepper too.

Technically this gravy goes over biscuits and I could have made those up in just about the time it took to cut the chicken from quarters to eighths, prep it and cook it but it seemed to need potatoes tonight.

Mashed. More than enough for anyone. I didn't set a spare plate out with it's own clean fork, but I thought it and I suspect that's enough.

Here it is. The oil was too hot but the chicken didn't suffer for it. You can tell the oil was too hot because it's gone too dark too fast. I don't keep a thermometer that reads to 350 or 375 (that's an instant read candy thermometer I use for jellies, it only goes to 220). So I just cook.

On the state of being fearful

I'm going to look at fear tonight. By and large, I am not a fearful person. I might be technically afraid of something, I might shy away or back off but I am not fearful. I do not lay awake at night being afraid. I am not paralyzed by fear unless I have to go anywhere near our CEO and president (I do NOT know why he has that kind of effect on me). When something is scaring me my natural inclination is to either a) do something about it or b) ignore it or c) just blow the whole thing up and be done with it.

I am scared right now though. I am so scared I'm down right stupid. I am afraid of something that is only the smallest possibility, something that I've been aware of for as long as I've been in relationship with my husband. Something that just now has got my attention in the ugliest possible way.

I am scared to death that my husband is going to get sick and die a horrible death and that I am not going to be able to bear it. I am scared that this is overdue; after all, his own father was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 38 and NoMans is almost 44. I am scared that he's going to be frightened and alone and disconnected and that I will become an utter lunatic and just make things worse.

I don't know why I'm scared just now. Could be Jeffrey dying like he went and did. Could be that small cough or bit of difficulty NoMans had swallowing the other day or the way he breathes like a freight train when he's really, really tired and maybe not sleeping as well as he should. Could be my crazy lizard brain just checking in or it could be real and I just don't know it on top yet.

It could be anything at all. All I really know is how I feel. That's how I feel. Today, yesterday, maybe tomorrow. Nothing to be done but have it. Funny how that works.

Vanishing Acts

A funny thing is happening over at Madcap's place. She stopped writing that particular blog sometime around November 7 and then left the site dormant. Sometime between now and then she collected a mess of comments on that last post which ought to have been enough to keep it active for a bit. In the last few days the site has started to vanish. Note that I did not say MC was vanishing, just the site. It feels funny though. First the prior posts were gone. And then the comments. And then the sidebar links. It reminded me of the book (there was a movie too), The Neverending Story, where the Nothing slowly at first and then quickly ate away at everything we know and expect to be known and reasonably solid leaving us wholly and completely inside the world of illusion and invention until there is just that one spark of a voice speaking... but she might not have spoken at all. Today there was only one sidebar link. I don't know why it's still there. Probably because it's recently active and it might be in her profile. Can't see that either I don't think. There's just that one last voice. And the thing is, MC's not gone, just the site.

Migdalia wrote the other night that she was back from a yoga retreat and working her way through Jeffrey's things. She wrote about going to church on Three King's Day and how hard it was to be there without Jeffrey in the choir but how hard it drove home the point of his absence. She asked me to write some more things about Jeffrey including the last conversation we had before he went to the hospital. I told her about the call I got weeks before his death while I was at the bus stop with Little Girl and I told him he sounded like Al Capone. I told her what time he called me and this morning at 7:45 while I was otherwise still indisposed my cell phone rang and NoMans answered it because it came from Dork on Dork - that's how Jeff was programed into my phone and it shocked the shit out of him. I couldn't take the call but the fact that she made that call at just about the same time he made it, so that she could walk through his last steps about blew the top of my head off. Jeffrey speaks.

And the thing is, Jeffrey's not exactly gone, just the site. I suspect he'd like it in Alberta.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time, when we were young and worked for the software factory, Jeffrey was my friend. We called him Sparky. We called him Sparky because once when his family was at church on Sunday morning Jeffrey was struck by lightening and while the house burned to the ground he escaped with Chips, the dog, and a good size scar where the lightening entered and where it went back out again. Somewhere in my house is a Hyperion Enterprise Admin manual that made it out in one piece. It’s charred but serviceable.

Jeffrey, it seemed, knew everyone. He was like one of those kids in middle school who glide effortlessly from one lunch table to the next, cool kids or geeks, made no difference for Jeffrey, he just fit in. What was really nice about this is that if you knew Jeffrey you knew everybody too and suddenly you could glide effortlessly from table to table and group to group. He was instant networking.

He was an instigator. Something was always happening and a good amount of the time you knew it was Jeffrey who did it but had no way to prove it. Occasionally he got caught, but it was rare.

In September of 1997 the Taco Bell Chihuahua was introduced and if you went to Taco Bell you could get a Taco dog that said Yo quiero Taco Bell if you squeezed him. I didn’t go to Taco Bell but somebody did and I became the proud owner of the Taco Dog. We all loved the Taco Dog; he was a great toy and developed a personality strangely reminiscent of Jeffrey up to no good. Everything was good and happy in the world until one day the Taco Dog was dog-napped.

I didn’t know the Dog was missing until I picked up a ransom note from my mailbox. The ransom note read something to the effect of…’if you ever want to see your dog again you’ll  blank blank blank. I don’t remember what outrageous demands were made but they clearly weren’t going to be met easily.

So. I wasn’t going to take this sitting still. I marched back to my desk, validated that the dog was indeed missing and hammered out an email to maybe a handful of possible suspects demanding the immediate return of my dog. Should said dog not be returned within 24 hours I would personally hunt down and torture the dog-napper.

As you can probably imagine, the dog was not returned. Instead I got another ransom note. This time the ransom note threatened to feed my Chihuahua to the Great Dane down the street. Now I don’t personally know any Great Danes but I was pretty sure this was a likely scenario.

I broadened my search and increased the email distribution list to include multiple departments and even trainers who were currently on the road teaching off-site and could not possibly have stolen my dog directly.

That day after lunch I received an email from our friend Chris confessing to the crime. “I’m sorry” he wrote, “I took your dog and I’m not giving him back.”  I actually bought it for a minute and Chris was horrified to discover he’d left his computer unlocked and accessible while at lunch.

Still no dog. I sent more email this time accusing at least six people directly in the hope that someone would roll over and give up the culprit. Nothing.

Finally Tracey responded from the field. From her hotel room she named the first five suspects indicating why they would or would not have stolen the dog and finally came to Jeffrey. I wish I could remember how she broke it down but by process of elimination her conclusion was that Jeffrey was the only person in the building who would even begin to go to these lengths with a stuffed animal and that only Jeffrey would have managed to involve half the building without once directly implicating himself.

The dog appeared outside my office at the end of the day. I’m not sure we ever got a clear confession out of Jeffrey but we all knew.

That was my friend Jeffrey. He had a way of being in the world that included and gathered in. He made family out of friends and extended himself everywhere he went.

Let go.

It is hard to post but I want a complete record, something to help put the pieces back together. It is Christmas in one hour and some minutes and this matters to me. It has always mattered. We had dinner. I cooked and baked all day. I cannot describe these events; what is that? I am comfortably numb? Something like that. But not so much I can hide from this.

Here are these things. I hurt behind my eyes. I cannot think clearly. I have lost my ability to function in a linear way that will have all things turn out and even then they will anyway. This is beyond my control. It is hard to type. Here is honest. Honest is often not pretty. Why do I care so much about that? Never mind, I know.

I know.

It all comes down to this: How can I be in this world when he is not?

How can he not be here to catch me? Slap me silly when I'm nuts. Something, anything. How can I be?

And so I am anyway.

Grief is not pretty.

But this matters too: Happy Christmas. Please. Yes. I do too.

I love you.

Let go.